Welcome to Yesterday Trailer Looks Like Michael Bay’s Primer

Remember Primer? Shane Carruth’s no-budget indie about kids building a time machine in their garage and looping back on their own timelines in more escalatingly convoluted ways is often held up by smarter-than-thou types as the best time-travel movie ever made. I don’t feel that way, because I think Carruth cheats by deliberately withholding enough information to keep us from fully understanding his plot and thereby punching holes in it.

And now Michael Bay just kinda ripped it off, adding more obvious storytelling, and of course exploding planes. As producer, he’s working with mostly unknowns here, and I find it unreasonably amusing that the director’s surname is “Israelite” while one of the writer’s surnames is “Pagan.” (Said writers are also doing Paranormal Activity 5).

I can’t tell if it’s found-footage style or just handheld – I CAN tell it’s an attempt to cash in on the success of Chronicle. The film was previously known as Almanac, but I’m guessing the Back to the Future reference may have seemed too obvious.